Should 'Murder by Eye' Critics Believe Something

Pierce 2022-03-23 09:01:48

A few years ago, there was a very mysterious book that was popular. The content of this book made people who first read it feel very incredible, and even felt a little nonsense. But it has been able to rank No. 1 in various best-selling books in the United States for a long time, has been translated into 41 languages, published a DVD of the same name, and sold more than 15 million copies worldwide... Yes, you may have heard of this book. It's called "Secret". The central idea of ​​The Secret is what you believe—believe thoroughly and from the heart, and what you believe will become reality. Coincidentally, in last year's Amazon book best-seller list in the United States, there was also a book that was very close to the theory of "The Secret", and was even called "the book you have been waiting for for a lifetime". That book was called "Conversation with God". In a country where religious belief has long accounted for more than 80% of the population, the meaning conveyed by the word "believe" is far more complicated than the literal meaning, and the pursuit of "belief" is by no means limited to religious belief. So it's not hard to see why books like The Secret and Conversations with God have been so successful in America.

"Murder by Eye" is also a story about "belief". The whole film revolves around a fictional (or has ever existed?) military organization "Earth Spirit Force", showing a story about superpower soldiers with dark humor. From beginning to end, Bill and Lynn, the founder of the "Earth Spirit Force", completely believed in the existence of superpowers, and believed that they were the ones with superpowers. The film is constantly interspersed with memories from Lynn's perspective to tell the story of the "Earth Spirit Force" and those "superpower soldiers" known as "Jedi", deliberately making it difficult to distinguish between true and false. But what is certain is that all those "Jedi", with or without a lightsaber, fully believe in their superpowers. In such "belief", the whole film also seems to be set absurd tone.

Therefore, some people say that this is just a funny movie that purely plays with black humor, and has no intention to explore anything profound. This kind of evaluation may have some truth, but in fact, the profound things are often not discussed. Are there really "superpowers" in movies? What happened to the sheep that was stared to death by Lynn? How did Lynn find the base in the desert? These are not actually things that the movie wants to delve into, because it is more of a symbol, a kind of thinking under the cover of black humor.

Let's start with a story. Before the 1950s, an operation for the treatment of angina pectoris was popular, which improved myocardial blood flow by ligating the arteries in the human chest to increase the pressure in the pericardial phrenic arteries. But by 1955, a doctor named Leonard Cobb and his colleagues questioned the rationale of the procedure, because they believed that the procedure would actually make no difference to angina pectoris from a medical point of view. So for the sake of research, they boldly performed sham operations on some patients—that is, only anesthesia and incision, but no arterial ligation. Then a miraculous thing happened, all the patients who had the fake surgery, just like the patients who had the real surgery, all "healed". After observing long enough, Dr. Cobb concluded that the effect of the procedure was comforting and not physiologically meaningful. And when he announced the results, the patients who had "recovered" with the sham surgery almost all relapsed at the same time. I think this story has said many things.

In fact, "placebo" like this "comfort surgery" is not new in the medical field, especially in various mental diseases, it is as common as aspirin. Modern medicine has increasingly found that people's mental activities are inextricably linked with their physiological activities. For example, when people imagine a certain action, the relevant parts of the body will generate physiological currents; when people are nervous, gastrointestinal functions will Disturbances, etc. In short, when people believe in something, people often have corresponding changes in their physiology, and this change will affect the matter at both the spiritual and material levels. This may be the scientific principle behind books such as The Secret.

In China, however, few people really want to believe in the power of "belief". We tend to believe in things like "how to look shrewd," "the unspoken rules of the office," "100 rules of being tactful," or simply "money." But believing these things is based on disbelief in the first place, just like a person who teaches you to lie, but you are not sure that he did not lie when he taught you, so you simply do not believe. Therefore, many people's minds begin to gradually move towards cynicism, which believes in nothing, and only knows material pleasures and loses spiritual pursuits.

In this film, the only villain, Larry, doesn't believe in superpowers, but he believes that "if there are people who believe in superpowers, then there will be some kind of change in those people." Therefore, he studies believers from the perspective of unbelievers and uses them to develop his own psychological theories. This seems to be more like the psychology of many Chinese people now, laughing at idealists from the perspective of pragmatists and using them to achieve their own utilitarian goals. It can be said that what this film really wants to express is the refutation of people like Larry. Just as at the end of the movie, the male protagonist who finally learned to "believe" after a series of events passed through the wall, not really learning superpowers, but telling people in a metaphor: if people believe, there will be "belief" "the result of. When we are surrounded by thick black school all day and are told to doubt everything, should we also learn to believe in something, just like the grown-up male protagonist, find our own wall to cross the past?

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Extended Reading
  • Hoyt 2022-03-27 09:01:05

    No matter who is who, spit will have to die.

  • Tania 2022-04-22 07:01:18

    We are all goats to be slaughtered on the pilgrimage. If we believe in faith, we are a group of mad goats

The Men Who Stare at Goats quotes

  • [first lines]

    Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: [with great concentration] Boone.

    Lieutenant Boone: Yes sir?

    Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: I'm going into the next office.

    Lieutenant Boone: Yes sir.

    Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: [breaks into a sprint, slams into the wall, falls over] Damn it.

  • Title Card: More of this is true than you would believe.